Advertising;Now that it is a separate company, Lucent is spending $50 million to create an image.

By David Barboza

Published: June 3, 1996

LUCENT TECHNOLOGIES, up until a few months ago, had an image problem: it had no image. In fact, Lucent Technologies Inc., the former AT&T subsidiary that was spun off earlier this year, had no name, no logo and no corporate identity.

But eight months after AT&T announced that it would split itself into three public companies, Lucent -- which was AT&T's systems and technology unit -- has adopted its own distinctive name, logo and image. And it has started a $50 million advertising campaign to let the world know that, with or without AT&T, it already ranks as one of the world's largest makers of telecommunications systems and equipment; it had revenue last year of $22 billion.

The first stage of the campaign is to create awareness," said Kathy Fitzgerald, senior vice president for public relations at Lucent, which is based in Murray Hill, N.J. "We're saying that the same people who sold you your phone and your chip are now named Lucent."

To get the message out, Lucent is saturating the country with television and print ads that introduce its new name, typeset in bold black letters, and its logo: a bright red circle hand-drawn in brush strokes. Its television ads, created by McCann-Erickson in New York, have been notable for their ironic voice-overs, which announce that after 125 years, a former division of the AT&T Corporation is "going freelance." The company's new slogan, "We make the things that make communications work," appears on a computer screen. The Lucent campaign, which comes just weeks after the record-breaking $3 billion initial public offering, may be one of the largest efforts to create an entirely fresh corporate image. But surrendering the AT&T name, identification and icon may prove to be difficult.

"It's like taking a baby out of an incubator -- it's breathe or die," said Alan Brew, a corporate identity consultant at Addison Seefeld & Brew in New York. "All lines are cut; nobody knows who owns this baby anymore. All spinoffs have this same problem."

While corporate image specialists say that forging a new identity is a constant challenge for companies, old and new, spinoffs often result in a loss of identity. That may be why Lucent, in its advertisements, is promoting itself as the home of Bell Laboratories, the distinguished research arm that has produced seven Nobel Prize winners and invented the dial tone and voice mail.

"We want people to understand we didn't just hit the market," said David J. Shaver, vice president for advertising and brand management at Lucent. "We want to transfer the equity we had under the old name."

To create its own image, the company hired Landor Associates, the San Francisco-based corporate identity specialists that are best known for creating the "Fed Ex" tag and image for the Federal Express Corporation and for redesigning icons for the Xerox Corporation and Gatorade.

Last fall, Landor generated more than 700 possible names and 50 logos, and after weeks of focus groups and executive scrutiny, the top 50 were whittled down to five before the new company's executives settled on "Lucent Technologies" (Lucent means "marked by clarity" or "glowing with light"). The name was chosen over more stale alternatives, like AGB, for "Alexander Graham Bell Technologies."

Peter Allen, a spokesman at Landor, said that both companies wanted to avoid names with the roots "net," "sys," "com," or "tel" in them, and also decided to depart from tradition by creating a jazzy "innovation circle" as the company's official logo -- a hip alternative to AT&T's more classical icon.

While some say the new Lucent name and icon are more befitting of a Silicon Valley start-up company, like Yahoo or Netscape, Lucent executives say it distinguishes their company as bold and innovative; that is why they chose red for the circle image, in an industry best known for its blue icons.

Even before Lucent had a name, it hired McCann-Erickson, which has handled the portion of the AT&T account that is aimed at businesses -- to develop a major campaign with print and television spots.

Nina DiSesa, executive creative director at McCann, a unit of the Interpublic Group of Companies, said the agency's mission was to give Lucent a personality. For inspiration, a team from McCann visited Bell Laboratories and latched onto an unpretentious yet sophisticated persona. "There was an interesting personality bubbling up there," Ms. DiSesa said. "These people were so smart they did not care who knew it. They were like, 'Yes, we created air, but that's what we do,' " she said, chuckling.

In the ads McCann created, the quirky young character who is heard but not seen while his words appear on a computer screen was intended to be a metaphor for the company, Ms. DiSesa said. "A $20 billion company doesn't start up every day," she added. "And if they do, they usually don't need a new identity."